Actually, no, not fair enough.. blinking ridiculous! Let's give some of these terms a decent meaning.
It's service theft if you somehow get the data and service from TiVo without paying for it.
It's service avoidance, if you effectively receive the same service as the Tivo sub offers but from an alternative source
or it's purely automating the way you use the data input to the manual recording.
I agree that if TiVo had disabled the man/rec facility and sold it as a sub-based box only, then avoidance and theft would be the only issues here. But they didn't.